


Old Japanese Ghost story

by ember_alda



Series: Realms of Influence [15]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Gen, Ghosts, Haunting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-19
Updated: 2012-03-19
Packaged: 2017-11-02 05:41:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/365559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ember_alda/pseuds/ember_alda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He feels a tingle up his arm, like the kind that shakes him when he’s up to bat, but closer, more intimate. This isn’t something shared between him and a team, this is Yamamoto alone, with the calling surge inside his blood moving every limb for him puppeted by a vague desire. It was the furthest thing from baseball he could ever imagine. </p><p>Wide eyed, his arm reaches out quietly, automatically, to touch this man’s sleeve. A dark and cutting smirk twist’s this bright being’s lips as he snarls into his ear.</p><p>“This is only the beginning, brat. I’ll teach you what it means to <i>live</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Japanese Ghost story

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: _Squalo is Yamamoto's imaginary friend_. Although I twisted it a little. Squalo haunts Yamamoto's sword and he is the only one who can see him.

The first time his dad showed it to him, he was led into the back where there stood an old, dusty wood cabinet holding its doors tightly shut in the hushed darkness. There’s barely any light that filters through the paper walls, but as a worn, wrinkled hand reaches out to silently open a door, the blinding silver gleam revealing the curved, graceful line of a katana draws in all the focus of his eyes.

It fascinates him when the family heirloom is placed into his hands. Tsuyoshi gives him a knowing look as Yamamoto takes it up to the light, eyes dancing with the way the sword seemed to glow, clear and vicious in his palm. When his father moves to open the cabinet to store it back on the rack, Yamamoto brings his hand up with eyes still riveted, and with a small tilt, cuts himself deep across the palm.

The slice is a line, thin and red that won’t stop dripping.

-0-

“W-wait up senpai!”

A laugh rings out fainter and fainter in front of Tamashi as the fleeting white back of his senior starts to disappear across the vast stretch of the practice field. 

“There’s no time to waste! Come on and try to lap me this time!” 

If anything else, Yamamoto starts to run faster, the breeze twice as cooling against his skin with the rush of acceleration. He can’t stop grinning as he flies across the green grass of the baseball field, energy not depleted but buoyed with the exertion. He had to push himself, he had to go higher and higher if he was going to help take the team to regionals. 

Every season, around this time, Yamamoto would start working up his teammates with him, trying to imbue them with urgency and pump up their practice. He wanted to face the Kaede Tigers again. His teammates from last year gave him a knowing look when he’d come in twice as spirited as usual after their last victory, gaining them a spot in the play offs rotation for their region. 

It had been an ongoing thing, this rivalry between Namimori and them. It was always a bitter fight to the finish to see who came out on top. Last year they lost their chance at the elimination rounds when the Tigers defeated them in a close game. Iyori, Kaede’s team Captain, always worked his team hard and Yamamoto needed to push himself further every year in order to defeat him. Running through his head is that scene, clear and focused, of Iyori nodding to him at the last inning, the acknowledgement of one rival to another that this was going to be something that went past their very limits.

The burning feeling clutched him till the very last point, and even as he anticipated this year’s tournament, the memory of that nod refreshes his drive to win.

-0-

This night wasn’t the usual. Across the fall of his sight it isn’t the bright butter glow of sunshine against his skin as a long, burning sensation skins his knees from a close slide against the base. It’s a dim room with a dim cabinet that’s a crack open, empty of the sword it held. Shigure Kintoki isn’t in his hand, but it’s right across from him in the room, and when he stares into the eye of this vicious beast, the same gleam of silver across the edge that one time now glinted in the falling strands of impossible hair.

He feels a tingle up his arm, like the kind that shakes him when he’s up to bat, but closer, more intimate. This isn’t something shared between him and a team, this is Yamamoto alone, with the calling surge inside his blood moving every limb for him puppeted by a vague desire. It was the furthest thing from baseball he could ever imagine. 

Wide eyed, his arm reaches out quietly, automatically, to touch this man’s sleeve. A dark and cutting smirk twist’s this bright being’s lips as he snarls into his ear.

“This is only the beginning, brat. I’ll teach you what it means to _live_.”

-0-

He comes back home with scrapes and cuts, with sore muscles and a permanent grin on his face. Kiyodai and the others had all congratulated him on his great pitching speed. He’d let pitching fall back over the years since he’d become one of their prime batters once he became a junior, but the familiar burn in his arm from wrenching every ounce of strength he could from it was comforting.

The years made him almost forgot how electrifying it was to throw on the mound. It was a silent, brutal struggle between him and the batter. Which inning it was, who was winning, what ball was their weakness and which was their strength, it all needed to be calculated into his pitch. Then, there was that part that was pure instinct. Their eyes would drill, relentless and still across the field, judging each movement, every flick and nervous twitch amplified. The sun crescendoed into an inferno on his back, the noise of a bee buzzing away echoed in the stillness of a hot day, the blinding shine of varnished wood from the bat as it sways converges with his eye, and his hand would all of a sudden move.

Sometimes he knew what he was going to do, and others it simply flew from the tilt of his wrist as if it was fate that moved his hand and god that whipped the ball across the plate into the catcher’s mitt. When the call came, it brought either a breath of relief or another tense, unmoving showdown of wills on the plate. It was almost shocking, now, that he’d let this part of baseball fade away, and after only one day Yamamoto couldn’t think of how he’d let it slip so far past him over time.

-0-

The dark pith of the earth is still muddy in some spots from the pouring rain that filtered through the forest. He can hear the rhythmic rustles of the trees from the hard blowing wind as he ran, harsh breaths panting as each limb strained to run faster. The cut on his side was flowing down in streams, weakening his might, but the smarting pain only stretched the wide, vicious grin on his face wider. 

The mass of darkened brush parts before him as at the small clearing, he opts to stop, sword strapped to his arm swinging up with dripping blood and clashing with the other blade that materializes out of nowhere on his right. Another man with a haggard beard and unreadable eyes twists his blade and swipes sideways in an unexpected turn of direction, and Yamamoto is hard pressed to dodge.

Breaths harsh and panting roll out his chest as he ducks under and lunges to the side, sweeping the tip of his sword in a semi circle around his back as he spins again, tripping up the man who attacked him from the trees. His blade comes ringing down and is blocked with monumental force as the man below him pants, sweat dripping down his eyes as he tries to stop the downward stab by grappling at the hilt. He feels heat running through his veins and the burn of exertion as with a flick of his wrist, the sword suddenly skips aside and instead cleaves through the meat of his opponents arm, slicing it in half.

The keening noise of pain rings out in the small secluded brush and as the blood starts to pool around his foot, there’s a smile as in the reflection of the eyes of a man who’s about to die, he sees his own form, tall and sure, long white hair clinging in the dirty wash of rainwater.

In the silence of the trees, he opens his mouth to the sky to laugh in victory.

-0-

“You seem a little more distracted, senpai.”

He looks over at Tamashi, surprise painting his features before he hunkers down again to breathe. Their sprints were twice as long as last week’s and even he was starting to get winded from them. 

“Haha, do I? I guess thinking about regionals is putting pressure on my brain.”

“Yeah but that doesn’t slow you down at all. I saw how you did out in the field, that was a prime catch! If anything your reactions are getting a lot better and faster.” 

Yamamoto looks down at his own hand, tracing the grooves of skin and callused flesh with his eyes, trying to fathom the improvement that somehow appeared from nowhere in his perception. He hadn’t really noticed anything different. Something had always seemed so urgent inside him. They always have to win _this_ year. He has to catch the ball _this_ time, he needs to up his batting average _right now_.

After those abrupt awakenings after long, mysterious nights where his hand automatically reaches out to the east room, where a dark, solemn cabinet sat alone, his mind tells him he has to move now, or something important will be lost.

“I keep telling myself I have to get better, that’s all.”

Tamashi laughs, half admiringly and half amused while he does his stretches, face open as he looks to the field where his yearmates are doing drills. “If only we could do the same thing, senpai. It’s a lot harder than just telling yourself you have to run faster or bat better.”

-0-

He’s sure this time he’s awake, but he can’t remember anything. When his senses come back to him in slow increments, the rushing beat of his heart, the short pants that move his breast, the shaking in his hands, all those things are alien. The side effects of adrenalin jolt him out from his uneasy slumber and he’s left alone in the barren room, the one on the right to his bedroom. 

The one with the locked sword, and a man, standing casually against the wall next to the closed cabinet with cruel eyes, encased in the shadow of the corner. For some reason it doesn’t alarm him, seeing this stranger, because underneath the quiet withdrawal during the day he recalls the flight of that white hair in the reflections of his enemies. He knows his skin as well as his own and the tight grip on his sword comes from skills he doesn’t remember ever having. Yamamoto stares into this alter demon and recognizes what’s come to pass when he’s unconscious has materialized in front of him.

“Don’t try and deny me, boy. I’m growing impatient with your philandering. Tsuyoshi was fucking slow enough as it is, I’m not waiting that long again.”

“I don’t know, I’m pretty dedicated to baseball. I’m going to become pro, you know.”

His calmly muted, bright words bring the man stalking across the room, a deathly silver beam latched to a transparent arm pressed close to his neck in sheer nanoseconds. Even though all he feels is the shivering cold bite against his neck, even though all he feels is air between them and he can see the light of the moon through the man, Yamamoto is afraid to move lest he cuts himself against the ghastly thing and bleed.

There’s an urgency that hunts this silvered man, it swirls in his eye as he looks down on one simple kid. Yamamoto can’t stop himself from being fascinated by this desperate fury that’s cramped down into a fake, clear iris.

“You’re going to pick me up, and you’ll _use_ me. This is end of the road for your petty dreams, it’s the real world now. Live or die, one person, one kill at a time.”

The faint restlessness that had been dogging him ever since the opening of the playoff season settles down, far into the back of his mind. His head is being consumed with the harsh, grating voice that echoed from the back cabinet and he can’t stop himself from collapsing down from the sheer force that brushed his chest, his arms, his face. It collided with him in a wrenching shove until he falls with a loud clatter against the dark wood furniture and the thing topples over with a bang.

Lying on the worn, stringy fibers of the bamboo mat is the spill of an unsheathed katana, blinding his vision in the night.

-0-

It’s an assassin’s sword, after all. Yamamoto learns the fascinating history of the thing from his father. 

Tsuyoshi looks down at the katana admiringly, but also cautious. He’d seen that look in his son’s face and it was reminiscent of his own youth, when he first laid eyes on the thing. The utter fascination, the complete encasement of the self when watching one’s arm glide through the air, the thin and precise tip flowing liquidly to strike. Yamamoto and him have something in common, after all. They both were called away from sushi or baseball, friends or their wife, whatever it was, by the gleam of the sword.

He smiles fondly at his enraptured son, something wistful in his eye as he looks at an almost clone of his past self. 

“Nothing else like it, huh? This is the sword that’s been passed down with the Shigure Souen Style, it’s said that there’s a spirit that lives inside of it, calling people to the most invincible school so it can bring them to ruin.”

He can tell his words are being washed away by Yamamoto’s sheer enthusiasm, so he bops the kid on the head hard. 

“Are you listening, Takeshi? You’ll have to discipline yourself, you’re going to have to practice hard to master the style. This sword isn’t a joke so you’re going to have to work hard against distractions and temptation. I raised you to be a responsible boy so don’t disappoint me!”

These are words Yamamoto can finally understand, the sincere gleam in his dad’s eye with a seriousness he doesn’t see often. 

“I won’t. I’ll work hard just like you did, dad!”

-0-

Blood gushes from his side in a dangerous fount. There’s stuff spilling from his lips as he crawls up onto his knees. The other man is doing no better, slouched against a wall with his thigh cut and spurting like a fountain from his artery. His breaths are slowing down, but he clenches his teeth and pulls at the severed parts and strings them up to move, the edge of pain pumping his blood out fast through adrenalin.

The other man is already standing, no matter that he’s swaying from loss of blood and about to die. Yamamoto forces himself to meet him across their small battlefield of marbled floor and long columns. The clash of their blades against each others is a dark struggle of weakening limbs and faltering skills, but the clawing fight that drives them is no less then when they started.

He wants to win. He _needs_ to win. There’s something he still has to do and it’s pulling him, urging him in every cell to move and move _now_. A wide arc of a long sword swipes across to try and take him out at the chest, but he dodges back and under the man’s arm, the short, sly cut of the wakizashi in his hand stabs deep into his enemy’s back.

His arm clamps down to his side, his vision is wavering in the light, but he won’t forget the small, dark light that nodded to him from a dying man’s eyes, the biggest acknowledgment one swordsman can give to another. The thirst in his veins won’t end. Even as he lay passing into unconsciousness, he wants to get up and hunt down that look on ten, thirty, a hundred more people. 

He watches the pool of his own blood stain his white hair and it satisfies him more than he can say.

-0-

There’s a certain blaze in his eyes this time. Yamamoto had taken himself off of the batting roster, asking the coach to switch him. As his eyes stake themselves on their target, he feels that familiar grit in the pores of his skin, the screaming pitch of his muscles as he strains to hold himself completely still, potential movement locked up in every fiber. 

Iyori is up to bat. This is the last half of the game and Namimori is down, trying desperately to even the score before the next inning. His opponent’s eyes are unreadable, his stance is calm and smooth. There’s only the barest tremors on his face that come from the sweat dripping from his temple, and Yamamoto waits, still. His foot shifts one slip of a step to test out Iyori’s stance, and the other boy hunches a barest centimeter down. He twists the ball in his hand as if ready to throw and the tenseness in Iyori’s muscles tighten. He relaxes his shoulder and moves back. 

The game between them continues, and finally, when the leisurely tests stretch out beyond comprehensible time, his wrist flicks back and the ball flies forward in a daring angle, crashing into the startled edge of a bat that throws it out into the field.

At the cries of the crowd, he takes off his hat and blocks the sun from his eyes, squinting to see the results of their showdown. A flimsy second later rocks the ball from the air when everyone holds their breath, and slams it down to earth.

It was the first foul ball of the entire evening.

-0-

“When are you going to stop wasting your damn time on a game?”

Yamamoto keeps on folding the sheet of seaweed, rolling slow and precisely in deep concentration. 

“It’s just as important as you are to me. Especially now that we’ve made it to the regional play-offs. Kaede’s trained up some really good juniors this year and I can’t let it slide.”

Propped against the wall in the corner, he sees the scowl crawl across Squalo’s face as he shifts his head away in sheer disgust. It was hard, but the days he practiced in the dojo were getting shorter as the season built up. He couldn’t lay his hand on the sword for more than a few hours a week, and even when he let go of the hilt his fingers lingered as if hesitating to let go. There’s a magnetic power in those times alone, when it’s just him and the sheer cut of the blade through air.

“What did I tell you? I said I’d show you how to live, and instead everything I tried to drill into your peabrain leaks out like a fucking sieve. What do you know, kid, when you’ve only ever half dedicated your self to anything?”

“I’ve always listened to what you’ve told me.” 

And he has. Yamamoto stores all those dreams and messages, those harsh barking words correcting his stance, the sharp edge to his vision when he dives in with his katana, they are cherished in memory that plays over and over again. It’s not half way because he knows this feeling, swordsmanship is simply the darker pulse of that urgent need he feels when playing baseball. It’s undiluted when he swings his blade unlike when it’s split between his team when he hits with the bat, but it’s essentially the same.

“If you insist on being half-baked like this you’ll never make it as a swordsman. One day someone is going to come for the kill and you’ll be completely unaware because you refuse to see this for what it is.”

Steadily, the calm features look out from the cutting board. Yamamoto glanced up to the ceiling, piercing it with his imagination and thinking it the sky instead. Dotted with trees and rain, with sun and clouds, or with rib vaults and marble, it’s still the sky he imagines.

“Then I’ll deal with it when the time comes, right?” 

The surety in his voice comes from naivety, of someone who’s sure they’ll never be touched. Squalo hadn’t chosen this stupid household because they were blessed with long life. He’d chosen it because it was the perfect magnet for challengers and brief, flashy interludes. However, the tenacity with which this boy reached for his goal, for his baseball dream, cut into him a small doubt.

For the first time in a long time, Squalo looks into the eyes of this young, foolish swordsman that harbors no bitterness or hateful drive, and thinks that perhaps, this time, he’ll be able to leave this godforsaken world and let the sword become a sword.

-0-

They don’t win regionals. At the very end, they played the double game again with Kaede, and Namimori lost again. It’s a cutting blow with how much time and effort he’d put into it this year, but at least he still has his senior season. Yamamoto comes back with defeat covering his eyes, and he looks back at his baseball bag where he’d hidden his sword along with his bat. He doesn’t know why he took Squalo with him to the game, but somehow his hand had shoved him inside.

The note on the table is short, telling him that his dad is off to order a new shipment for this week. He wants to pull off his bag and take Shigure Kintoki out, to feel that crazed surge that thrills his body when he’s connected with the blade. He needs something to bring him out of his disappointment.

A short rap on the table turns him around from his stance by the open dining area. The blotch of a man, worn and solemn, blocks the light coming in form the open doorway of the restaurant entrance.

“Tsuyoshi, where is he?”

“Uh…he’s not here right now. He went to order the next shipment of tuna. Can I take your name?”

The man has nothing but a dead look in his eye, lidded like a fish and just as empty. He steps forward into his space, and instinctively, Yamamoto backs up into the wall, the long, thin bag on his back clunking against the wood.

“You’re his son, aren’t you? Shigure Souen style’s new disciple…”

His hand automatically goes back to scratch his head sheepishly while he lets out a semi-nervous laugh. “I wouldn’t really call me a disciple. Dad just taught me the basic forms, he-”

Not another word was said before a pair of foreign arms stretch out and lunge, slamming the man into an empty wall where Yamamoto had dodged in reflex. From inside the long, olive trench coat a blade strapped to his side is drawn out, and it’s looking into those coldly focused eyes that this was no joke. Like an amateur, he stumbles around his own house half tripping on furniture he knows is there while the blade above him cleaves down and down again, one gigantic slice cutting through the side of his hair and slicing part of his ear. 

He weaves and traps himself under the sushi bar counter, hastily unzipping his bag to find Shigure Kintoki exposed and latches onto the thing for dear life, clutching it so hard in his hand he can’t feel his wrists. Pitching forward, he dives past the stranger’s legs and whirls upward behind a dining table, the few short feet between them buying him time to block the rapid blow that swiped at him again.

A lock on his arm grows strong. Yamamoto can almost feel Squalo’s hard and unforgiving touch molding his elbow in place, rubbing his head raw with pain and amplifying every twist this man makes as he comes across the room to hunt him down. 

Yamamoto is ready, there’s fear and disgust and panic in his gut but his hand is sure. It doesn’t matter if he can’t think, if he can’t calculate what’s going to happen next, if all his practices with the sword fall blankly back as if they never happened. His feet move for him, his arm thrusts forward in a sharp, linear strike as the man dodges, then flings to the side and cuts up in one long, hideously diagonal arch.

Soon enough there’s a sickening squelch, and even as Yamamoto panics while he tries to pull out the sword, he can feel the soft bite of fleshy resistance as if he had been cutting into a slab of beef. His arms can’t stop shaking from the unnatural surge of strength that usurped his arms, and his eyes can’t close themselves against the pink and red riot that spilled across the folds of a dull, olive coat. 

“S-Squalo? Squalo?”

There’s nothing running up his arm. He doesn’t feel anything when he calls. There’s no teasing wisp of silver in the corner of his eye, there’s no harsh, grating brush against his mind. All there is, is a fount of blood and a strangely geometrical spray on the front of his shirt. Somehow his mind thinks to itself, when looking at his handiwork, of how Iyori wouldn’t approve of something like this and this rising irrationality inside keeps pressing against his head, his skin, and Squalo isn’t there to _explain_ it, to ridicule him for being ridiculous.

A pitch, high and strained rings through his voice. “Where _are_ you? I can’t do this alone.”

The emptiness of the shop envelopes him. His fingers are trembling. The slickness of the blood doesn’t dull the blade. It looks the same, bright and glittering as the day it was when he stepped into the dim eastern room. He can’t hear anything but the pounding of his own veins and the throbbing in his foot from when he wrenched himself into the killing blow.

He tries to hold himself together but he can’t. Slowly in increments his body bends, and stoops, until he’s crouched in on himself.

_“This isn’t a game.”_

_“There’s a spirit that lives inside of it, calling people to the most invincible school so it can bring them to ruin.”_

_“I’ll teach you what it means to live.”_

_“You seem a little more distracted.”_

_“This is the real world now. Live or die, one person, one kill at a time.”_

The loud drop of a bag crashing to the ground and the rapid clock of boots across the threshold jerks his head up. Tsuyoshi looks at the slumped form, his mess of a son, the smooth blade resting in his palms and the helpless look on his face.

He leans down and clutches Takeshi against him, eyes checking over his body for wounds, eyes sad and horrified with this pathetic, quiet little scene. 

“He-he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there anymore, what am I supposed to do? I can’t carry this thing _alone_.”

In his arms he takes up his boy, as delicately as possible from the scene. They go into the back, away from the line of sight of the body and as he watches the tight clutch of Takeshi’s finger grip the katana with the strength of those petrified in fear, he understands. He whispers to his son the saddest lesson he ever learned.

“That’s the last greatest lesson of the sword, Takeshi. It was your hand, it was your own action. It’s a lonely responsibility. It’s up to you if you feel at fault, and I’m sorry this is what happened.”

Tears squeeze out from the corners of Yamamoto’s eyes for the double loss. In his hand is something dead, it still functions the same but from his perspective metal and leather aren’t the only things that composed a sword.

“If a spirit leaves this realm, are they happy?”

His father only looks down at this poor boy that was shoved out of his short life too early, and sighs.

“To relinquish your hold on earth I imagine is very hard, but that’s the natural way of things, right?”

 

 

THE END


End file.
